Oh joy.
Now it'll be even harder to find somewhere to sit in those places for those of us who, you know, actually came for a coffee.
Starbucks has granted Brits free Wi-Fi access. Tweeted the coffee giant today: "All our customers can access Free Wi-Fi at hundreds of Starbucks locations throughout the UK. Just click 'Connect' and enjoy!" Starbucks free Wi-Fi UK Well, not quite all of the beverage purveyor's punters: the company was later forced to admit …
So, how about Starbucks give you a voucher for 15 minutes of "free" Wi-Fi access when you buy a coffee.
That way, some punters will be going through four coffees per hour, so that equates to just under £10/hour, making it the most expensive free Wi-Fi on the planet.
The customers will be so very wired from the caffeine they probably wouldn't even notice..
I should be in marketing.. not a techie...
This is a response to Caffe Nero's recent decision to offer free WiFi, I suspect. Starbucks are usually more generous at offering power outlets for customers, so this is a good move. It will certainly mean I use Starbucks more often, even despite their somewhat inferior coffee.
Both Pret a Manger and Wetherspoons offer free Wifi at their regular outlets and not at their airport outlets, too. I suspect it is because the owners of the airports have sold "exclusive" rights to offer WiFi within the airport to someone else, and therefore prevent regular retail tenants from offering it directly to their customers. It's certainly an annoying state of affairs.
Free wifi has been available at Starbucks in the UK for years.
All you've ever needed to do is grab a Starbucks card, register it online and then use your Starbucks account to get free wifi. You only ever need to put money on the card once to register it and then you can buy your coffee with it as usual, leaving £0.00 on your card.
I'm fed up with cafes and the like that advertise "free WiFi" - which is true - but then don't connect you to the Internet unless you pay through the nose for it. Seems too much like a 'bait-and-switch' trick. What use is a free WiFi connection that doesn't connect you to anything?
So which is Starbucks offering - free WiFi or free Internet access?
Why don't the airport/transportation authorities in the UK provide free WiFi at airports like they do in civilised society? Imagine arriving at an airport and actually having to PAY for WiFi.. the mind boggles.. that would be like paying some sort of license fee just to watch TV or listen to the radio..
The WiFi is completely free, and evenly distributed throughout the departure lounge so that everyone can get a signal. Talk of civilised nations should not exclude this little backwater nation that has simply got it right.
Contrast with Charles De Gaul airport and of course our own BAA operated rip-offs and that puts this lot to complete shame.
Starbucks may not have coffee beans run through a civet cat, but here in the U.S. most of them offer a wide selection of beans and many have single cup brewing systems that yield a fine cup of coffee. Their staff are uniformly friendly (as required by policy) unlike some of the small coffee shops with their snooty hipsters pulling the shots, and equally hip clientele hunched over their Macbooks with ironic stickers plastered on the lid, using the local Wi-Fi which requires a WEP key that represents an inside joke.
Perhaps the coffee in Starbucks::US is better than it is here.
In the UK if one has a caffeine dependency then Starborks is the place to avoid as the stuff is weak and, well, rather pointless.
if ever I venture into a city then I tend to look for an old fashioned place run by an Italian, Turk or a Greek that had been there since the fall of the Byzantium Empire as then I know that the coffee will be flavoursome and full of bollocks.
I agree with other posters. In the US the connection just works. Hell, I walk past the local Starbucks on the way to the gym and wifi kicks in, no problem, no logon, no nothing. Any BT Openzone, even free access in the UK when I visit is a brutal pain in the ass for smartphone screens. Those Jackasses at BT have no flaming clue. Less with the logon thing, just make it work.
The whole Wi-Fi standard was very poorly thought out. The only authentication method specified was a single all-user password, so you can't really blame BT or anyone else for needing a web-based login screen.
What we need is for the successor to WEP and WPA to specify a standard for individual user domain authentication. Until then, we're stuck with the hacks in the current generation.
I've been using Starbucks free Wi-Fi for a couple of years. You just register a Starbucks card on their website. When you fire up the laptop, connect to the Starbucks BT Openzone hotspot and fire up the browser. You end up on a BT Openzone landing page with a Starbucks login option - no need to sign up to Openzone.
The only time I tried a JD Wetherspoons hotspot the laptop couldn't handshake with the router.